Sherlock Holmes

Peter Cushing is a flinty Holmes in several incarnations, backed here by Nigel Stock as Watson.

The professional Sherlocks

During the period of cultural upheaval in the 1950s and 1960s you might
expect Sherlock Holmes to be perceived as a relic of a stodgy earlier age. Filmed
and televised crime stories then were all about gunfights and car chases,
nothing like the refined intellectual labour of Sherlock Homes and his
imitators.

Yet right into the 1960s there remained a fascination
with, or at least a curiosity about, Doyle's creation.
Appropriately, the
most prominent Holmeses of the time were portrayed by classically
trained British stage actors and veteran
lights of the British horror cinema, who took Holmes seriously—and took him into his
middle and later
years.

In the years after Rathbone retired his magnifying glass, the most
celebrated Holmes may have been Peter Cushing (best known to a
younger audience as the evil Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars), though we may
have to thank the actor he replaced on a television series for giving us back the real Holmes.

Not-so-scary Hound

Cushing started playing Holmes in Hammer Studio's The Hound of the
Baskervilles in 1959, which co-starred his
horror-film colleague Christopher Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville.
The film was helmed by their talented Hammer director Terence Fisher.
Together they'd all done a ripping
Curse of Frankenstein two years earlier, a great Dracula
the year before, and a decent version of The Mummy the same year
as Hound.

Odd then that Hound, which was known as Doyle's darkest
tale, seems too light and sunny in this remake. Perhaps because
this is the first version of Hound to be shot in colour. Only the
dark night scenes on the moor carry the requisite mood of doom.

Cushing is not as imposing as Rathbone as the detective, being
smaller and finer featured, but he possesses a flinty
intelligence that works well. He seems to take very seriously
his intention to portray Holmes honestly, bringing out his
austere and prickly sides, the serial depressive of the
novels—not so much as to put off his admirers but with a hint of
the man's
anti-social nature that had been missing in earlier productions.

Morell and Cushing in Hound film.

To balance him, he has a capable and pleasantly dull Watson. Andrι
Morell has to actually carry about half the movie, as Watson handles
matters at the Baskerville home, meeting characters and
unearthing clues, while Holmes skulks in the background, until
his dramatic re-appearance in the case.

Lee has little to work with here as Holmes's client, with scenes of mainly awkward romance
and dull-witted victimization. If all your relatives had met gruesome
ends and your own murder has been threatened, would you continually wander
onto the moors alone at night?

Maybe people weren't ready for such a faithful take on the
legendary story, for the Hammer Hound was less successful
than the studio's more outright horror fare. However, this
version has risen in Holmes fans estimation over the years and
now takes its place beside the 1940s classic.

Shrunken Sherlock

Nearly a decade later, Cushing
reprised his role in the 1968 series Sherlock Holmes for British television, when he replaced classical actor
Douglas Wilmer who had been been Holmes in the 1964–1965 instalment of the BBC series.

Wilmer as haughty Holmes.

Wilmer respected Doyle's work, for which we have to thank for the
relative faithfulness of the series instalments which were express
adaptations of the original stories. The actor, known before
this role as an interpreter of Shakespeare, ended up
rewriting many of the episodes, which he considered to have been
written and produced shoddily.

Wilmer too was interested in presenting the dark side of
Holmes, which had been played down in most previous outings to make him more affable.
Wilmer's long, somewhat lugubrious face and his often
haughty manner as Holmes, looking down his substantial nose, helped to distance him from the audience,
leaving it to the competent Nigel Stock to engage
their sympathies as Watson, representative of everyman.

The series was launched in 1964 with "The Speckled Band" as
pilot. Today the black-and-white film appears somewhat stagy but it is a decent
version of the story. The conclusion however, as with many of
the succeeding episodes, is anticlimactic, failing to dramatize
the story beyond the solving of the puzzle.

It was quite popular at the time though and twelve more episodes
were produced the next year. Titles include some of the best
Holmes mysteries they could get the rights to, including
"The Red Headed League", "The Copper Beeches", "The Man With the
Twisted Lip", "The Six Napoleons" and "The Beryl Coronet".

Despite Wilmer's misgiving, the hour-long episodes range from
good to excellent as adaptations. They are generally true to
the basics of the stories, though their presentations are
often rearranged. For example, although Conan Doyle usually begins each
case with clients calling on Holmes and Watson, most of these televised
episodes begin with the on-site dramatics involving the victims
and suspects and don't bring in the detectives until
ten minutes in.

This 1965 season was also very popular with British viewers, but
Wilmer, who fought with management, refused to return. Ten of
his episodes survive in their
entirety and are available, along with the pilot, on DVD, albeit in
rather sloppy transfers.

This short television run, however, led to Wilmer being identified with Holmes in the minds of a generation of fans. He also made a series of audio recordings of the stories and briefly returned as Holmes, alongside Stock as Watson, in Gene Wilder's parody
The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother in
1975.

Classic Cushing Holmes.

A long search for Wilmer's successor on the TV series ended with
the natural choice: Peter Cushing.
As might be expected, Cushing plays
Holmes in this series with an austere coldness, as if he's always mildly irritated about something.
Perhaps he's annoyed with the show's producers, as he
experienced the same difficulties with low production values as
Wilmer had. This however also works to distinguish his Holmes as
the most disdainfully rational of the lot—although he could
indulge in a convivial chuckle with Watson when it is called
for.

Cushing's Watson continued to be played by Nigel
Stock and the two of them created another memorable duo, acting
out more episodes adapted from Doyle's stories—although this time in
colour and with more natural, less theatrical presentation.
Television had come a long way between 1965 and 1968. Still the
acting is a little overdone (though never from Cushing or Stock)
and the sound is a little hollow.

First up, is "The Hound of the Baskervilles" in two
parts—Cushing's second turn as Holmes in the thriller on the
moors. This one doesn't have the sweep and slick production of
his 1959 film, but it is not bad for television of the time. On
some points it follows Arthur Conan Doyle's novel more closely
and on other points it departs radically in the interests of
compression; the best parts of the two adaptations together
would make up one very long and faithful Hound of the
Baskervilles.

The worst part of this production is the very abrupt and
unsatisfying ending, a failing that strangely afflicts several
of the other surviving episodes in the Cushing series.

Most of those episodes are taken from Doyle's first two
novels and first collection of stories (The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). Because "A Study in
Scarlet"—taken from the novel in which Holmes and Watson first
meet—is not the first episode in the series' order, it must
proceed with the mystery as though the two are already old
friends. But, for the most part, this and successive entries are quite faithful to the Doyle canon.

They proved even more popular than in the shows run three years
earlier, but one season was enough for Cushing. He left the show, which
never returned. Only five of the Cushing episodes have survived (including ""The Sign of
Four", "The Blue Carbuncle" and "The Boscombe Valley Mystery") and are
available on video.

Then in 1984 Cushing played his final
Holmes, The Masks of Death, as an elderly Holmes who comes out of
retirement for one more case. Co-starring John Mills as Watson, along with
Ann Baxter and Ray Milland, the British television film was a triumph,
despite not being based on a Doyle story.